The Bond Brain-From Russia With Love

Here’s a post that I first wrote for jamesbondlifestyle.com which is a site I recommend you visit,(after you visit this one of course). It deals with some lifestyle advice that is tailor made for the bachelor. It was part of a series called THE BOND BRAIN, which looked at several of the novels, and extracted words to live by. Enjoy!

amazon affiliate, you don’t pay more, I get a small commission when you read this Ian Fleming classic. Cover will be different.

We continue with the Bond Brain as evidenced by quotes from the Fleming novels. In this installment, we not only quote 007, but the late and lamented Darko Kerim, the Brit’s man in Istanbul in From Russia With Love.

Let’s start with an enlightening quote from Darko. In speaking with Bond, Darko confesses “I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time.”

Words to live by if you are not too old, but if you live by them for too long, you will never get to be too old. Don’t worry, most of you reading this have plenty of too much time left.

Sooner or later one realizes that the only thing we have at the end of life’s journey, besides a terminal condition that will kill us, is our memory of life. What we did, what we didn’t, what we are grateful for, what we regret.

You want to max out on what you did and what you are grateful for. You want to minimize the regrets of what you never did.

In order to do that, you have to follow Kerim’s sage advice. Know what it is like to over drink, over smoke, over…well you can figure that one out. Don’t do it all the time of course, but don’t always limit your excess to moderation.

While you’re drooling on your shoes in the nursing home, you want to be able to wax nostalgic about the time you had the fifteen hookers and a kilogram of marmalade at that seedy Copenhagen railroad hotel. You want a smile on your face as you reminisce about the two quarts of Japanese Whiskey you drank while pissing in the streets of the Ginza.

As a sage once said, nothing succeeds like excess.

Speaking of regrets, let’s quote Bond here. “Never job backwards. What might have been was a waste of time.”

Words also to live by. So you never wrote the great Armenian novel, you never climbed the big rock candy mountain. So what? Focus on what you have done, your triumphs, your more interesting tragedies. Follow Kerim’s advice, and you won’t have much need to listen to Bond’s above thought.

Here’s another one from James. “Now from months of idleness and disuse the sword was rusty in the scabbard and Bond’s mental guard was down.”

Now, the obvious symbolism of the above we will leave to those whose sex life is intimately connected with audio visual equipment. But the old saw about how a rut is just a shallow grave is true. Routines and routine thinking can leave you rusty, and if we listen to Kerim, we know it’s better to burn out than rust.

Examine what you have been doing, thinking. Is it just the same old same old, or is there a bit of innovation of improvement each day of your life? There should be if you are living the James Bond Lifestyle, (which is the ultimate bachelor lifestyle).

Follow the above advice, and nobody will be asking you “What lunatic asylum did they let you out of?” (As Bond said to Grant in the movie).